October 3, 2008

Matt Millen has been fired. 

You might not know who Matt Millen was, and even if you do, you probably don’t care. Well, you shouldn’t. Millen was, after all, the president and CEO of the Detroit Lions, a moribund organization that hasn’t won a championship in over five decades. If the Lions are the FEMA of football teams, then Mike Millen is its Mike Brown. 

But I can’t help but being reassured on some deeper philosophical by Millen’s firing. It’s a long overdue blow for such core values as competence, humility and human decency – all of which Millen lacked. 

The season before the Lions hired Millen, they inished 9-7, just missing the playoffs. They were frustrated, and ready for change. So they hired TV analyst Matt Millen, an outsider with a fresh outlook – and no management experience whatsoever. Sound familiar? 

The family of William Clay Ford has always been first class. They’ve never tried to extort more money from the tax payers by threatening to leave for Los Angeles, and they paid for most of their new downtown stadium themselves. They are also in the habit of hiring nice guys who finish last. But Matt Millen did not even rise to that low standard.

Oh, he finished last, alright. Dead last, almost every year. Under Millen’s seven year reign of terror, the Lions posted a record of 31 wins against 84 loss – 12 a year -- the very worst in the league. They’ve started this season with three straight losses. A 9-and-7 season now looks like the Emerald City, a dream land gleaming far off in the distance. 

Millen wasn’t a nice guy who finished last. He was an utterly incompetent office bully who said so many stupid things he spawned websites devoted to his dumb quotes. He was so mean-spirited that even the secretaries, who never say boo to the press, felt compelled to complain to reporters about what an unbelievable jerk Millen was. He was a triple jackass. 

Now, Darwinistically speaking, you should never be both arrogant and incompetent. If you’re arrogant, be smart, and if you’re incompetent, be nice. But Millen was both, and that’s why he’s getting weeded out of the office gene pool – although six years too late. 

Millen was so incredibly bad, on every level, that the most common hand-made sign you’d see at Ford Field was not Go Lions, but Fire Millen. You’d see this at almost every game – and not just the Lions, but the Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings games! 

They got it right. They knew that just because you pay someone $5 million a year, making him the second-highest paid executive in the league, does not make him worth $5 million a year. And it certainly doesn’t make him the second best executive, either. Millen will walk away with $50 million. 

But he really won’t walk away at all, since he never even moved to the state in the first place.  He doesn’t even live in a neighboring state or province. No, he lives in a castle he built with the Ford’s millions in the hills of his native Pennsylvania, and flew in on the weekends to watch his team lose. 

So, we would say good riddance – but Millen was never here to begin with.   

That’s at least some consolation in that. 

Heckuva job, Millen.  Heckuva job. 

Copyright © 2008, Michigan Radio